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Birch/Aspen Forest Wall Mural for Kids Room

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Birch/Aspen Forest Wall Mural

for Kids R

tit

m

Written By: Michelle Hlubinka

f TOOLS:

• A pair of scissors. (1)

• Sponge (1)

• Tape measure (1)

O PARTS:

Contact paper (1)

my color was called "champagne" I

believe

Acrylic paint (1)

SUMMARY

We started renting our house a couple of months before our son was born. My friend
Humberto had painted a beautiful Sendak-esque tree on the walls of his son Horatio's room. I
wanted to have something similar but didn't want to repaint when the landlady retires and
comes back to California and we have to move out. So I looked for wall murals, and in the
end decided to make my own.

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Birch/Aspen Forest Wall Mural for Kids Room

• Cut lengths of contact paper that
equal the height of the trees you
want. From the top of the
baseboard to the bottom of the
molding, my walls measure 88
inches. So I cut four or five pieces
that were 24" wide (the width of the
contact paper) and 88" long. Since
each piece would yield 3-5 tree
trunks, I'd have 3-6 trees per wall.

Step 2

Create a bark pattern to the contact
paper. Cut a sponge stamp in the
shape of an eye with a hole in the
middle. You can stamp the knots in
the tree's bark and use the thin
edge of the sponge to create lines
radiating out from those. My paint
was a mixture of yellow with a
smidgen of black, so it's not a true
black. I didn't want a dark black, as
in the real world trees have all
sorts of living things that give the
color a little warmth.

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Birch/Aspen Forest Wall Mural for Kids Room

• Cut trunks. This is the sheet before
I cut it into 3-5 long trunks. To cut
the trunk-strips, I used the grid
side of the contact paper and cut
roughly along one line, allowing the
scissors to wander off the line a
little bit because trees don't make
straight edges in real life! I also
added some wiggle to the edges of
the original contact sheet too, since
a machine-made edge would look
weird next to my wiggly edge.
Advanced mural makers may want
to add a very gradual slant to the
trunks, so that the trunk is thinner
on top than on bottom, and
alternating up and down to
conserve contact paper.

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Birch/Aspen Forest Wall Mural for Kids Room

• Create leaves. To paint the leaves,
I started with an undercoat of
yellow, then regions of sponge-
painting: a little red, some green
and lots of orange over the yellow.
It's a little like an Eric Carle effect.
I also added some metallic gold
sponge-brushing to the paint. When
this dried, I cut out heart-shaped
leaves. I was so happy with how
this looked before cutting I wished
I'd done it on canvas. Another time.

Hang the trunks. Start by peeling back the first inch of the adhesive backing all the way
across the top of the trunk piece. Securely pat it down all the way across, and pull the
backing down a few inches and secure it to the wall some more, smoothing it onto the wall.
Keep pulling the backing off and smoothing the trunk onto the wall all the way down to the
bottom of your wall. You should find the tension of pulling helps adhere the giant tree trunk
sticker to the wall smoothly.

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Birch/Aspen Forest Wall Mural for Kids Room

• Cut leaf shapes out of the color
sheet you painted (I made vague
heart-like shapes because I love
my boys and I love that aspen
trees have heart-shaped leaves.
My trees are somewhere between
aspen and birch.) This part can be
tedious as it's tough to peel off the
backing on the leaves. I put up
about 30 of them and then decided
that we should wait to make this a
ritual for guests who came to meet
the kids— that each visitor adds a
leaf to the forest.

Tip: It helped to pre-peel the backing from the leaves a bit, tear the backing a little from the
notch, and then reseal the adhesive backing to be hung at another time. I did this while
watching Comedy Central.

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Birch/Aspen Forest Wall Mural for Kids Room

\4

• Another tip: You can make your forest seem more populated by cutting a couple of the
trunks into shorter segments to make truncated trunks above doors and around windows.
In this view you can also see a corner of the giant world map I hung using this same
contact-paper method, making a frame for the map and essentially taping it to the wall.
You can see in the second picture that I forgot to add a trunk piece under the window,
actually.

This document was last generated on 201 2-1 1 -03 01 :24:07 PM.

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